Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor laureate of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, designs programs for listeners who really like music. By that I mean, listeners who go to concerts often, listeners who buy and listen to recordings – curious listeners, in other words. These listeners like to hear music they haven't heard before, or too often. They enjoy a Rachmaninoff piano concerto or a Brahms symphony as much as the next man but they also want to expand their knowledge of the repertoire, and get a kick out of doing so.

Just off a successful U.S. tour with his other orchestra, the Philharmonia (of London), Salonen returned to the Philharmonic to begin two weeks of concerts commemorating the centenary of the great Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski (1913-1994), a frequent visitor to L.A., and friend and mentor to Salonen. The main item on the menu for the first weekend of concerts was the composer's Symphony No. 1 (1947), which the Philharmonic was performing for the first time and recording (live) for Sony Classical, thereby completing a set of the composer's symphonies (the other three were recorded by these musicians many years ago).

With the Lutoslawski First in place, Salonen built a program around it, opening with a seldom performed Beethoven overture ("King Stephen"), slipping in Lutoslawski's short "Fanfare for Los Angeles Philharmonic" and ending with Beethoven's Symphony No. 2, one of his less frequently performed. Thus, the program included no bona fide masterpieces (though that could be argued) and it ended, a little unusually, with the oldest music on the agenda.

The Lutoslawski/Beethoven pairing was a considered one. In a short film on Lutoslawski shown at the concert Friday, Salonen said he considered Lutoslawski a "successor to Beethoven" and that seems about right. Lutoslawski, unlike many of the post-war avant-gardists, continued to compose in traditional forms – symphonies, concertos, song cycles – throughout his career. But even more, he was a composer who always kept the listener in mind, not necessarily by a softening of his rhetoric, but by building dramatic edifices that communicated in narratives, viscerally and humanely. Not for Lutoslawski the joys of cold abstraction. You feel his music.

The two symphonies revealed composers on the verge – Beethoven on the verge of the "Eroica" and his revolutionary greatness, Lutoslawski on the verge of his more celebrated avant-garde and revolutionary self. His First, fully mature, is a neo-classical work, tonal, in the customary four movements and evoking the edgier styles of Bartók, Stravinsky and Prokofiev. It is beautifully and imaginatively orchestrated, drivingly rhythmic, biting, dark (but not without wit) and brassy. But underneath it all is the reserve of the neoclassicist. The music is neither nihilistic nor depressing; the composer works his material out in musical terms, instilling order and logic. Nevertheless, Stalinist authorities condemned it as "formalist" and decadent and officially banned it.

Salonen's Beethoven is bracing without being too fancy. The "King Stephen" Overture was dashed off with gusto and snap; there's not a whole lot on its mind and Salonen took it for what it is. Fast tempos, even in the Larghetto, kept the Second Symphony moving along fleetly (the violins, at times, seemingly on the edge of their seats), crisp and bright accents vaulting it forward. There was also plenty of warmth in the sound, too, and flexibility in the tempos and phrasing that allowed the music to breathe. In short, it was an interpretation that didn't call undue attention to itself. It was natural, unaffected and so well and tastefully tailored that a listener could focus almost entirely on Beethoven's music.

Lutoslawski's "Fanfare" (1993), for a phalanx of brass and percussion, is less than a minute long (reading the program note took longer), but of interest nevertheless. It packs a punch, is formidable despite its size, and even finds time for some brief aleatory passages (a kind of controlled chaos in which the musicians individually make decisions about how their notes are played). In the both the "Fanfare" and the Symphony No. 1, Salonen and the Philharmonic sounded very much at home. This well planned and well played concert made us feel the same about this music. It's nothing to be scared of; Lutoslawski was one of us.

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